'The issue which has swept down centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later, is The People -v- The Banks'

Monday, 10 November 2014

#HYPERPRODUCTIVITY TEXT #DOCUMENTS LaTeX #FLOSS FREE #BESTEDITOR

Having spent all my life writing, throughout university, into writing legal documents; then 8,400+ pages on the web; etc, having spend ten years and longer working out all the ways I couldn't get things done quickly with documents, I finally worked it ALL out; and the answer was LaTeX.

A day course at Oxford University later; a year or two after taking the course and 5 minutes after I finally grabbing what I worked out back then was the software to implement the best way always to produce just about any document from NOW ON in YOUR life: enjoy!

LaTeX (/ˈleɪtɛk/lay-tek or /ˈlɑːtɛk/lah-tek[1]) is a document preparation system and document markup language. It is widely used for the communication and publication of scientific documents in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer science, statistics, economics, and political science.[2] It also has a prominent role in the preparation and publication of books and articles that contain complex multilingual materials, such as Sanskrit and Arabic, including critical editions.[3] LaTeX uses the TeXtypesetting program for formatting its output, and is itself written in the TeX macro language. LaTeX is not the name of a particular editing program, but refers to the encoding or tagging conventions that are used in LaTeX documents.

LaTeX is widely used in academia.[4][5] LaTeX can be used as a standalone document preparation system, or as an intermediate format. In the latter role, for example, it is often used as part of a pipeline for translating DocBook and other XML-based formats to PDF. The typesetting system offers programmabledesktop publishing features and extensive facilities for automating most aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, including numbering and cross-referencing of tables and figures, chapter and section headings, the inclusion of graphics, page layout, indexing and bibliographies.

Like TeX, LaTeX started as a writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists, but from early in its development it has also been taken up by scholars who needed to write documents that include complex math expressions or non-Latin scripts, such as Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese.

LaTeX is intended to provide a high-level language that accesses the power of TeX. LaTeX comprises a collection of TeX macros and a program to process LaTeX documents. Because the plain TeX formatting commands are elementary, it offers authors ready-made commands for common requirements such as chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references and bibliographies.

Contents

The 7 Privacy Tools Essential to Making Snowden Documentary CITIZENFOUR

What needs to be in your tool belt if you plan to report on a massively funded and ultra-secret organization like the NSA? In the credits of her newly released CITIZENFOUR, director Laura Poitras gives thanks to a list of important security resources that are all free software. We've previously written about CITIZENFOUR and Edward Snowden's discussion of his motivation to release closely guarded information about the NSA. Here's a closer look at the seven tools she names as helping to enable her to communicate with Snowden and her collaborators in making the film.

Tails

One of the most robust ways of using the Tor network is through a dedicated operating system that enforces strong privacy- and security-protective defaults. That operating system is Tails—The Amnesiac Incognito Live System—and it's designed to run from a USB stick plugged into nearly any computer, without interfering with already installed software. Tails has received support from a group called the Freedom of the Press Foundation, where Poitras sits on the board alongside Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, who also features prominently in the film.

SecureDrop

Also from the Freedom of the Press Foundation comes SecureDrop, a whistleblower submission system designed for journalists who wish to protect the anonymity of their sources. SecureDrop was originally designed by the late activist Aaron Swartz and the journalist Kevin Poulsen, and has been actively developed by Freedom of the Press Foundation and a network of volunteers for the past year. It has been deployed a number of prominent news organizations, including the New Yorker, Forbes, ProPublica, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Poitras and Greenwald's current publication, The Intercept.

GPG Encryption

GPG encryption is the only one of the technologies Poitras mentions that actually gets significant screen time in her film. Throughout her early interactions with Snowden, the two consistently used emails encrypted end-to-end with GPG encryption, represented onscreen with the jumbled letters and numbers you see if you don't have the private key necessary to decrypt. GPG has been criticized for being unfriendly to new users, and it requires that both the sender and receiver are familiar with it. But it may be getting easier to use: we've explained how to do so on Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux, and the Free Software Foundation has also prepared a guide.

OTR Instant Messaging

The Off-The-Record protocol allows for encrypted communication over existing popular instant messaging networks. It is one of the simplest ways for two users to get end-to-end encryption; that is, a communication that is encrypted with a key that only the recipient has, not a trusted third party. Our Surveillance Self-Defense guide outlines how to use OTR for Mac and Windows users. We've also awarded its co-founder Ian Goldberg with a Pioneer Award in 2011.

GNU/Linux

If you find the arguments for free software security tools compelling, you may be interested in using an operating system built on the same principles. GNU/Linux is much broader that some of the other tools mentioned here, and encompasses an enormous number of distinct collections of software, called distributions. Maybe most people won't come home from seeing CITIZENFOUR with a sudden desire to switch operating systems, but it's at least worth exploring.

Snowden's leaks—and the resulting news stories, books, and now documentaries—have profoundly affected the way people around the world think and talk about privacy and mass surveillance. It's encouraging to know that, even in the face of enormous spying programs, average computer users have access to powerful tools that can help keep their communications safe from prying eyes. Learn more about how to defend yourself from that surveillance with our Surveillance Self-Defense Guide.